Re: Doogie Mice

Matt Gingell (mjg223@nyu.edu)
Fri, 3 Sep 1999 03:25:12 -0400



From: Patrick Wilken <patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au>

>Sorry to disappoint you, but you are actually very normal.

Damn it. I was just starting to feel special... <sniff>

>My view (which is controversial) is that the sorts of capacity limits we
>see are caused by low-level noise and not a high level capacity limit.
>Basically the more things you try to attend to the poorer the quality of
>the signal you (more specifically neurons in the prefrontal cortex) have to
>work with. Once you get beyond about four 'things' the quality of the
>signal drops off quite quickly (though there is no absolute limit to the
>number of things that can attended to).

This is interesting. How would it explain the large variance across people in performance on memory tasks - lists of random numbers, for instance. Is buffer size variable, or do some people pay more attention to each number. (whatever that would mean.)

-matt